19 October 2011

Lytro, living pictures from a light field camera

Lytro, will be a revolution in photography, no doubt about that. There were so many revolutions in this industry, from film photography with negatives to digital photography to the small cameras you can have it wherever you are carrying your phone with you. I don't want to write a review about Lytro or persuade anyone to buy it. I am going to list my concerns about it. To my opinion, Lytro is nice for taking pictures and viewing them online, or in its small LCD it has. You can't find any discussion about if you can import the image to a jpg file or not. If not, you are stuck with the lpf file and you have to only view your images in that. You can not have images on your cell phone, photo frame or any other device. I believe there will be a conversion tool available (if not already in the software included). Other concerns of mine are the quality of the images imported from the lpf file.

My other concern is how much noise is going to be there? Is it even comparable to the most amateurish DSLRs in terms of quality in pictures taken? It is half price of some DSLRs. With a DSLR you can adjust everything, ISO, exposure, .... With Lytro you don't even have a flash. Is it good enough for you? If you don't mind the price and are too eager to be among the first people to try it, head to lytro.com and buy it. If you are looking for some point and shoot, you can find cameras for under 100$s. For 1000$s you can buy a really nice DSLR right now, top of the line. You can take HDR images with DSLRs, ... but you can only have a picture taken with Lytro that you can focus later. How many pictures you want to have that functionality? Imagine 350 images (i.e. it's lowest capacity version of Lytro) you have taken from a wedding, how long will it take to figure out the best focus points using its software? isn't it easier to take two or three pictures using a nice DSLR and do no after-taking-focusing anymore?